The insurance mafia does more than just force us to buy what it sells (using the government to apply the forcing). It also forces the car companies to force us to buy “safety.” Here’s the latest example:
The insurance mafia created an entity called the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which sounds a lot like the Federal Reserve in that both sound quasi-governmental but in a benign kind-of-way. “Institute” has a vaguely academic/credentialed smack to it. What the IIHS is, in fact, is the PR arm of the insurance mafia. It markets “safety” – via its Top Safety Picks – which lauds new vehicles that are designed in accordance with the mafia’s desired parameters and shames those that fall short.
The insurance mafia applies pressure for all new vehicles to be ever-“safer” and increases the costs of the insurance every car owner is forced to buy, if the car they own is not a Top Pick. More finely, it increases the costs even more if it is not a Top Pick.
A fact not often discussed is that even if a vehicle is a Top Pick, tit does not mean lower insurance costs. The mafia has been increasing everyone’s costs – including people who have “safe” cars and faultless driving records, no tickets or claims – which shows us that being a “good driver” doesn’t matter, in terms of what we pay for what were forced to buy.
It is likely, going forward, that the mafia is going to make insurance punitively unaffordable for people who own vehicles that lack the latest “safety” equipment. Their argument will be that such vehicles are riskier to drive – an assertion they can make based on generalities and statistics rather than specifics, just as they already do with regard to drivers who they claim are more likely to get into an accident based upon their having been ticketed for speeding or even just for not “buckling up.” It does not matter that individual driver hasn’t gotten into an accident – even if he’s been driving for decades. The insurance mafia having the power to demand (and get) more money just by asserting that a given driver – or vehicle – is less “safe.”
This will nudge drivers out of whatever they are driving – and into something “safer.” That is, newer – and so equipped with the very latest driver pre-emption technology.
Speaking of which . . .
The IIHS announced the other day that it will require Top Safety Picks (beginning with the 2027 model year) to be fitted with intelligent speed assistance (ISA). The term is as fatuous and dishonest as being “asked” to pay taxes. ISA is a speed limiter that is intelligent in the sense that it is not merely a limiter that prevents a vehicle from being driven faster than a pre-set speed. Many commercial vehicles such as over-the-road trucks and school busses have had that for decades. This is different. ISA knows what the speed limit is on whatever road you’re driving on and adjusts the vehicle’s speed to no faster than that.
Initially, of course, it will be sold to people as merely warning them that they are exceeding whatever the speed limit is, via a chime/icon-flashing in the main gauge display. That “technology” is already embedded in most 2025 model year vehicles, incidentally. What the IIHS wants is a fully enabled version of that “technology” that makes tit impossible to “speed” in a vehicle so equipped. Bad enough. Worse is that IIHS – and the government, which amounts to the same coercive entity – will then go after vehicles that are not equipped with ISA. Perhaps the government will require they be retrofitted with ISA (in order to be legal for use on the government’s roads). The insurance mafia, for its part, will charge owners of vehicles that do not have ISA exorbitant premiums, forcing them to stop driving them.
There’s more.
IIHS also says it will also require its Top Picks “to have impairment detection devices by 2030 or sooner, which will monitor driver intoxication and impairment and prevent anyone with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08% or higher from driving.”
Italics added.
This is much more than just a passive alcohol detection system to prevent “drunks” from driving (by presuming everyone is a “drunk” until proven otherwise, a logical elaboration of using sobriety checkpoints to establish the same in a more scattershot manner). If it were only a passive “drunk” driver detection system, why add “and impairment”? Well, because “impairment” will be defined as driving outside the acceptable parameters, as for example failing to use a turn signal before changing lanes (perfectly reasonable if there are no other cars nearby) or changing lanes aggressively (that is, quickly rather than glacially). Same goes for braking – and accelerating – too aggressively. Such driving will be considered “impaired” and synonymous with “drunk” driving. When either is detected, the car will take action to prevent the driver from driving. It will either not start at all (“drunk” driving detection, which is apt to be defined as any trace of alcohol whatsoever) or it will stop – and pull itself over – when it detects “impairment.”
The IIHS announcement is an exampled of the push-pull technique that’s used to pressure the vehicle manufacturers into embedding such things as ISA and “drunk/impaired” driving detection systems in forthcoming vehicles. Those that lack these “safety” features will not earn Top Pick status and those who own them will incur higher-than-others insurance costs, to nudge them into “safer” cars.
Of course, the safest car of all is one you don’t drive at all – and that’s the road we’re heading down. But has the mafia considered that when we get there, it will no longer be able to mulct drivers – because there aren’t any of those around anymore?
. . .
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Corvettes catch EeeVee Disease:
‘Shawn Conner was refueling his high-end 2024 Corvette at a gas station in early June when the car spontaneously caught on fire, torching it in a matter of minutes.
‘Last month, GM recalled the vehicles over an unusual issue: In some Corvettes, a cooling fan that runs even after the car has been shut off could blow spilled gas on the engine and catch fire. The recall affects more than 23,000 Corvettes that start at over $100,000.
‘Before the recall was issued, nearly 1,600 affected Corvettes were on dealer lots. GM issued a stop-sale notification to dealers as part of the recall, meaning those particular Corvette models can’t be delivered until the fix is made. — WSJ
https://archive.ph/k3Fgz#selection-777.0-777.275
Wild guess: the C8 Corvette’s fuel filler neck, behind the driver’s door, is TOO CLOSE to the hot engine, also located just behind the passenger compartment.
Eric warned GM against changing the Corvette to an exotic mid-engined configuration, with a $100K-plus price tag. But EeeVee Mary wouldn’t listen. 🙁
They wanna have a war, keep their factories
They wanna have a war to keep us on our knees
They wanna have a war to stop us buying Japanese
They wanna have a war to stop industrial disease
— Dire Straits, Industrial Disease
The IIHS is also the biggest booster of the enforcement-for-profit racket of traffic cameras.
“But has the mafia considered that when we get there, it will no longer be able to mulct drivers – because there aren’t any of those around anymore?”
Sorry, I’m somewhat technically-challenged. What’s “mulct”?
Hmmm. Good question.
Plunder
Tariffs
Wondering if disconnecting/grounding out the antenna and thus separating “your” car from the mother ship will brick the car or just set off a bunch of alarms. Anyone out there have any experience of this or know of someone who tried it? Enquiring minds want to know.
U.S. based airlines achieved peak fuckery decades ago.
Not sure what that means, but I haven’t flown since 9/11.
Rude, entitled passengers who try to drag everything they own onboard because they’re too damned lazy to use check baggage, groping TSA wanna-be cops, cramped seating, and hairy-legged “flight attendants” (used to be called stewardesses till the girly-men forced their way in – sounds fun, doesn’t it?
If I can’t drive it, I don’t go.
Fuckery: to screw you over, contempt for their passengers. Also, perhaps people don’t want to pay $35 to check their baggage, then wait hours for it at the luggage carrousel, or wonder how it ended up in Madagascar.
Six years ago, I bought an airline-compliant carry on that measured 22″ long, 12″ wide, 12″ tall. This coming Friday, I fly to the People’s Republic of Rhode Island (not because I want to, my wife organized this excursion). American’s allowable carry-on dimensions are now 22″ long, 14″ wide and 9″ (NINE!) tall. I’ll have to check my former carry on, unless I can slip it past the gate Stasi. Our taxpayer dollars subsidize the infrastructure that makes the airlines’ grift possible.
When the “nanny devices” are legislated into law and become a part of automotive lore, there will be a market for hackers to provide disabling software and hardware through the OBD-II port. Just because the nanny devices are there doesn’t mean that they cannot be deactivated.
Indeed, Anarchyst. These people who want to be our Overlords (for our “safety”) forget to read history. It did not work with Prohibition, and it will not work here, either. For every rule, someone will fine a way around it. Ironically, it will create new wealth (and possibly millionaires?) for those who find a way around this safety junk, and sell it at a price. They get rich, we get our non-safety vehicle, and both sides are happy. Whoops, it means the government is not.
Isn’t their measure of safety supposed to be for the occupants of said vehicle?
If someone injures you, how would their insurance know that they should charge less because their insured driver will hit a more or less safe vehicle?
The portion of insurance someone pays to protect themselves like uninsured / underinsured should go down, but your health insurance would be primary, so car insurance likely wouldn’t take effect anyway.
Given car insurance doesn’t play a part in payments to the insured if they are injured, why does the IIHS care how safe your car is? They worry about damage to the car, yet they helped force cars to collapse when a fly lands on them.
The whole system is stupid.
Drivers should carry blanket liability to cover damage and injury to others and loss protection on each vehicle in case it were to be stolen or a tree fall on it, if so desired.
If you have the money, self insure, or take the risk of needing to come up with the cash if you cause damage to someone else, just like in the rest of our lives.
For more corporate fuckery, check out Amazon’s “surveillance pricing.”
Okay, I did:
‘In 2000, Amazon endured a public relations meltdown after randomly fluctuating the costs of popular products to test different price points. Users quickly caught on to the situation by comparing prices in online chat rooms, with one customer even discovering that deleting browser cookies led to reduced prices. Although the company defended its action as a business experiment, the situation resulted in severe backlash and thousands of refunds.
‘Such occurrences don’t end here. A research study in 2015 found evidence that the Princeton Review was charging significantly higher prices for SAT test prep and tutoring courses for zip codes that contained higher population percentages of Asian residents. Just three years earlier, in 2012, the popular travel site Orbitz was caught directing Mac computer users to more expensive hotels based on findings that they typically spend 30% more per night.’
https://tinyurl.com/yr9xu8zp
Whoa … if I log on to Amazon with a creaky old steam-powered, Windows 98 vacuum tube computer, will they ship my whole shopping basket free as a charitable donation?
So I go down the streets
Down to my good friend’s house
I said “Look man, I’m outdoors, you know
Can I stay witcha maybe a couple days?”
He said “Uh, let me go and ask my wife”
He come out of the house
I could see it in his face
I knowed it was “no”
He said “I don’t know man, ah she kinda funny, an’ all”
I said “I know. Everybody funny. Now you funny too.”
— George Thorogood & the Destroyers, One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer
Well good luck when their Amazon delivery cretins ruin your property. I had my driveway coated last week, one day cure. I’ve driven on it since every day no marks just tire dust. Leave at 10, home at 3. Amazon box on the porch and stop start turn marks in my fresh coating, they were obviously hot dogging in and out. Delivery was at 11:37. Out here they deliver in private cars, in my hood it’s a Prius driver.
Take pictures, file a claim. Amazon has conveniently farmed out claims to a third party and of course “you didn’t prove it was an Amazon driver, claim denied”. They flat out lied said no Prius had to be a van. Van doesn’t have 5 inch wide tire marks, narrower than my Grand Cherokee. Internet full of the same story, one guy had video of the driver backing over and snapping off a metal mailbox pole, they denied him as well.
I suspect when cars become unaffordable to the majority of the population an uproar will occur over all this high tech pushing up the cost of new cars. Something might even happen to our benefit then.
I’m either an optimist or an idiot and only time will tell.
In addition to the spying mentioned, the mafia’s current monitoring of any driver also includes programming that penalizes any rapid slowing down. So if you are cruising along at or near the 45mph speed limit on a limited access road and a traffic signal changes from green to red in front of you, there will be a rate-increasing report on your record when you lawfully stop for the traffic light. The only way to avoid such a report is to drive 25mph on all roads that have traffic lights regardless of the posted speed limit – or risk being t-boned (and cited by any cop nearby) for running red lights.
Personally, I’m actively looking for another country to live in where the corruption is more affordable.
I’m currently renting a Hyundai Elantra. It has the speed limit sign on the dash that turns red when I exceed it. Many times it has declared a speed limit that was wrong, both low and high. What happens when, as a couple days ago, it insists the speed limit is 25 when you just passed a sign that’s 55? And the locals think that’s way too low.
Like they care.
And they say AI is going to take over the world.
Random numbers showing accident trends over the years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
FTA: “For recent years, data may not be as consistent as previous years, due to different methods (estimates) or different sources”
Don’t like the numbers? Change ’em til you do!
Insurance has way overtaken banks as the most predatory financial institutions in the world, and by a wide margin. We are sitting ducks while they invent more and more ways to take everything we have.
‘IIHS said it will require its top picks to have impairment detection devices by 2030.’ — eric
Rep Debbie Dingell’s notorious Section 24220 is five years in the rearview mirror. It turned out to be a toothless tiger, when it came to shoving passive alcohol detection down our throats by model year 2026. Given laws Congress Clowns can’t repeal, such as gas dispersion and Brownian motion, it ain’t gonna work.
But the IIHS ukase is a more credible threat. Since passive alcohol detection probably is impossible, it implies a breathalyzer interlock on every new vehicle.
Predatory fedgov regulators already have made new cars into safety-nanny devices that most buyers don’t want. Make breathalyzer interlocks standard, and millions will join me in shunning new vehicles forevermore.
Hi Jim.
I hear you. I hate the new cars. Ugly, heavy and loaded with nanny tech that will gimp your car when it eventually fail somehow I suspect they won’t be drivable when all those high tech systems die and parts aren’t available.